Imagining a Nation: History and Memory in Making Zimbabwe (Reconsiderations in Southern African History)

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Description

In Imagining a Nation, Ruramisai Charumbira analyzes competing narratives of the founding of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe constructed by political and cultural nationalists both black and white since occupation in 1890. The book uses a wide selection of sources―including archives, oral histories, and a national monument―to explore the birth of the racialized national memories and parallel identities that were in energetic contention as memory sought to provide itself as history. In contrast with current global politics plagued by divisions of outsider and insider, patriot and traitor, Charumbira invites the reader into the liminal spaces of the region’s history and questions the centrality of the nation-state in understanding African or postcolonial history lately.

Using an interdisciplinary methodology, Charumbira offers a series of case studies, bringing in characters from far-flung places to show that history and memory in and of one small place can have a far-reaching affect within the wider world. The questions raised by these stories go beyond the history of colonized or colonizer in one former colony to remove darkness from up to date vexations about what it means to be a citizen, patriot, or member of a nation in an ever-globalizing world. Moderately than a history of how the rulers of Rhodesia or Zimbabwe marshaled state power to force citizens to accept a single definition of national memory and identity, Imagining a Nation shows how strange people invested within the soft power of individual, social, and collective memories to create and perpetuate exclusionary national myths.

Reconsiderations in Southern African History

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